REVIEW: ‘The Prison Service claim that they’re about preserving family ties – but it’s totally the opposite; they take your stamps away, they move you hundreds of miles away from your family,’ former prisoner, Christopher...

Last week, in three appeals about priority need for the homeless (Hotak, Kanu and Johnson [2015] UKSC 30), the Supreme Court overturned the test used by local authorities for 16 years to decide whether a homeless person is ‘vulnerable’ and so in...

What I write about here is the preservation of access to justice. It is not about preserving legal aid lawyers’ diminishing incomes. There have been many platitudes spoken about Manga Carta. There will be bucket loads of clichés and noble...

When parliament was seeking to amend the test for compensating victims of miscarriages of justice, it was pointed out that requiring a person to prove that they are innocent might in itself, strangely enough, offend the presumption of innocence...

In April, the criminal legal aid profession organised a protest rally in London, their final effort to force their cause onto the election agenda. Former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Anthony Hooper delivered a keynote speech at the event, uttering...

The announcement that Innocence Network UK (INUK) had disbanded in September 2014 came as a real shock to those of us on the inside still fighting for justice. There had been no indication to those of us on their waiting list that the...

In January 2003, news broke in the British media that anti-terror police had raided a ‘ricin factory’ in north London. The headlines could not have been more alarming. The Sun: ‘Ricin near Bin pal’s home’ (‘The poison factory used to make deadly...

Caught in a collision of unemployment, precarious jobs and reduced public services. Part three of our series on the housing crisis: Losing your home. In Britain poor people in social housing live under constant threat of eviction. Lose one...

The politically controversial idea of a UK bill of rights, may – writing in advance of any new government – be about to take off, in the new context of a possible convention to draw up a codified constitution for a federal UK. Human rights (the...

A new campaign to prevent ‘sexting’ teenagers from being labelled ‘sex offenders’ was launched yesterday. A civil liberties group Backlash, set up to defend freedom of sexual expression, is making the case for a change in...

After caring for his elderly mum a 50-year-old builder faces eviction from a council flat. A tall, broad-chested man with rounded shoulders, close cropped and a gold chin-stud approaches the red brick county court in West London for the...